Historically, applying to schools whether undergraduate or graduate has involved the time consuming and often frustrating chore of physically compiling educational credentials such as transcripts, diplomas, and related documents as well as letters of reference and recommendations from teachers, mentors, employers, and others who may have had some influence in a student's life, and mailing the package to the institutions requesting the documents, in some cases at a substantial cost to the student applicant and or job seeker applicant. Before the advent of the internet and the convenience of electronic communications, this chore was doubly cumbersome, requiring phone calls or letters to the registrar for transcripts and to mentors and others with personal knowledge of the applicant requesting letters of reference and recommendations to be sent by mail to the applicant or directly to the institutions, with prolonged periods of waiting by the applicant or the institutions to physically receive the paper documents.
With the advent of the world wide web and the ability to rapidly disseminate and receive information, several online systems have emerged replacing some, but not all paper trails of yesteryears. Career and employment systems that primarily focus on matching job seekers to employers are well known in the art. U.S. Pat. No. 6,266,659 (Nadkarni) matches skills and resumes of candidates to employers and U.S. Pat. No. 6,385,620 (Kurzius & Johnston) employs a recruitment system matching candidates and employers. U.S. Pat. Appl. Pub. No. 2007/0294092 (Calannio) describes a system for marketing job applicants by creating and organizing credential as well as other personal information in the form of a customized advertisement to be shown to prospective hiring parties.
Online resume submission and storage as practiced by popular career and job websites such as Monster.com Careerbuilder.com, Hotjobs.com etc. are also well known in the art. U.S. Pat. No. 7,016,853 (Pereless & McCrae) describes a method and system for recruiters to collect jobseeker resumes from multiple “resume warehouses” such as the mentioned career and job sites by compiling the resumes from these sites into a service provider database to be accessed by the recruiter or employer for a fee. Intl. Appl. No. PCT/AU1999/000466 (Benheim) describes a method and system for selecting candidates for employment by storing candidate information in a database which subscribing agents and employers are able to access upon authorization by the candidate for a prescribed period of time for a fee. The candidate must reapply every three weeks to keep the curriculum vitae active. In these mentioned prior art, the storage of information in the server database is limited to resumes/curriculum vitae of the candidates for employment.
A few colleges and universities have made provisions for the access of transcripts online, but this is limited to their own graduates. U.S. Pat. No. 7,213,019 (Noris & Ortiz) provides group specific career management tools to group members such as students, faculty, department administrators, group officers, and alumni, or by entities trying to target group members.
Online storage and retrieval systems and methods thus far have addressed only the storage and retrieval of individual resumes and/or references for access by employers. U.S. Pat. No. 6,904,407 (Ritzel), uses an internet based electronic repository of only job seeker references. The system requires employers to pay a fee to purchase the details of the candidate's references. In, U.S. Pat. Appl. Pub. No. 2007/0282620 (Hatami), the recruitment server gathers and delivers the candidate letters of reference to the recruiters. If the referees chosen by the candidate refuse to give reference letters for the candidate, the candidate is not notified personally by the referees. Rather, the referees notify the recruitment server their desire not to give reference letters for the candidate; the server then notifies the candidate resulting in the candidate having to find other referees for the recruitment server and again go through the process of waiting to hear from the server whether a second or third referee has accepted or refused to provide the candidate a reference letter. This results in a time consuming and round-about way for the candidate job seeker to provide references to prospective employers. It is to be noted that in both Ritzel and Hatami the online storage of candidate information is limited to personal references with no communication means provided for access to any other information about the candidate job seeker by the employer or even by the candidate himself/herself such as academic transcripts from educational institutions, professional certificates, military records, rental and credit history etc., from other entities, and a means for storing such information securely online for easy access as envisioned by the present invention.
In general, none of the mentioned prior art have addressed or helped resolve the issue of the tedious work involved in compiling and disseminating the educational credentials and related documents by a student applicant to an undergraduate or graduate school for admission or to an employer by a job seeker. There is a significant pent-up demand for reliable and pertinent access to academic and career background data of students and job applicants. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a centralized education credentials document storage and delivery database system easily accessible by the student applicant or job seeker as well as by the admitting institutions and employers to fill the vacuum left by the prior art. The present invention fulfills that need through its streamlined online educational credentials document management system.
The present invention is not merely a current enrollment or degree verification system as described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,263,491 (Geldermann & McKechney). Rather, the system and method employed in the present invention is based on the realities of job searches and graduate school applications. The highly affordable service of the system allows any student or job seeker to maintain all of their academic and career documents in one convenient location in a centralized database online. It places the power in the hands of the school or job applicant to decide which institutions and employers should have access to their records and the type of records that can be accessed through the centralized database by the institutions and employers.
The centralized educational credentials database system of the present invention uses a powerful online application processing method that will enable students, jobseekers, employers or graduate schools to quickly and easily access electronic copies of transcripts, letters of recommendation, candidate evaluation, resumes and related documents in an efficient and time saving manner to meet application deadlines. Armed with this service, students and job seekers will be able to quickly and efficiently apply to many different schools and/or job positions while colleges, universities, and employers will be able to quickly access all of the necessary information about an applicant from a single centralized location and quickly make an initial determination regarding the applicants prospects for admission to schools or a job. In addition, colleges and universities will experience the added benefit of having all of the transcripts, letters of recommendations, evaluations, and related documents for the past and present students available securely online, thus eliminating vast amounts of paperwork as well as the expense of hiring and paying personal to do the work of answering phone calls and emails and gathering and sending the requested documents physically by mail.